On the information superhighway, there are passengers and drivers. Then there's the yahoos who try to eat and drive at the same time....

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

I've been working on the...

Yesterday was a laborsome day at work. It's not that we were swamped with jobs--though we had plenty to do and left some work for first shift--but they "upgraded" my computer by swapping it out with a faster model. So once again I spent at least the first half hour of my shift resetting preferences and copying files. And then, once I got working, a couple of jobs took twice as long as I had to hunt down the proper utility or settings to work the job the way I wanted. I've been through the process many times in the 13 years I've been working there. You'd think it would get easier, but actually some things have gotten better while others have gotten worse. On the positive side, it used to take a least an hour to do that initial "settling in" on a new station. The faster hardware undoubtedly helps, but I think that OS X's Users setup makes it easier to, er, set up. That's one thing I wasn't too crazy about when the system was introduced, but now I have to admit I like it. Of course, that also has it's downside. Like I said, my machine was swapped out. Our IT guy helpfully copied our personal folders over to an accessable backup drive, but I had difficulty finding some settings for Adobe InDesign. (Is it really that hard to create a separate file called "PDF export presets", Adobe guys?) I tried to go over to my old station and export those settings, but the new user wasn't there and the station was set-up so that no one could use the station without a password. Quite a change from the days when I could and often did access any number of computers in the shop and work on multiple stations. But, of course, that was before we were an industry leader with a global presence and undoubtedly the target of terrorists eager to steal our PDF export settings. Maybe I'm just waxing nostalgic or developing a "short-timers" mentality, but I missed having the greater access to and responsibility for the tools I use in my job.